The return of the ISEE 3

http://spacecraftforall.com/home


Great website with cool interactive documentary-like experience! Check it out! Also, it'll be live-streaming the fly-by of the moon in a few hours (Sunday, August 10th 10:30am PT - 12:00pm PT) , but I'll be asleep. Also includes live data anytime! =)

This whole project was crowdfunded and they (the hackers/makers) work in a hackerspace/mission-control in an old Maccas building! Lol! And with NASA's blessing =) Them talking about *SCIENCE* so much reminds me of stuff like Portal, xkcd, KSP (get them science points!) haha.

Also, great post about SoftwareDefinedRadio; been meaning to get my HAM radio callsign sometime soon ...

Also, the initial swing-bys to get to the 1st comet flown through by man is so cool and complicated, it reminded me of an epic version of this:

I mean, orbiting in one plane is hard enough to learn (in a fun way) in KSP. Add in polar plane and crazy manoeuvres and orbits like Quasi-Zenith and I have to spend more time wrapping my head around more simulations, models and reading.
P.S. My short-term goal is to build and launch a (nano)sat in one of them Quasi-Zenith orbits servicing Australia =P Hopefully I'll get to crowdfunding when I've actually done work on it xP.

1st interview published online

So another Star Citizen post. With a very Linux-y twist. Here's all the previous SC related posts.

1st interview published on web-@CzenStar:New Org Profile: #StarCitizen's own #Linux User Group http://t.co/TJms4Iur0n pic.twitter.com/7FwhkDlNVB
— V C (@pd_12) August 9, 2014

I've blogged a bit before but never have had anyone blog about me (I think ...)
Here's my first interview published online! It's about our 'org' (i.e. clan, guild, outfit, etc. in the Star Citizen universe) called "Linux Users Group", based on the LUGs around the world. (Link is to Australia, VIC LUGs but hey, that's where I am =P)

Obligatory iframe for this momentous (=P) occasion:


It'd be great for anyone interested in Linux to join our LUG org! It'd also be cool to see you in the Unofficial Linux Thread. Hope to see you around the verse!

P.S. recently re-watched some Firefly (among other things) on my new 1080p 3D TV setup with 5.1 =3

Skype for Linux finally updated

Yay!
We are no longer v4.2.0.11 but v4.3~!

Skype has finally been updated (major version) since at least a couple of years!!!
(That mini-update that took away functionality and probably covered their covert NSA-assist spying doesn't count).

Pidgin - my favourite IM, and Skype crashing my X Session

Pidgin - Because all the protocols are in one place =)
Skype, MSN, FB, Steam, etc.
Unfortunately Skype's a nuisance and needs to be running for pidgin to incorporate it.

Pidgin works cross-platform so I can have my logs (at ~/.purple/logs) symlinked to my window's partition logs so cross-partitions they're all the same logs =)
I could also symlink some of the files as shown in the config file link below. 

Good cheatsheet for config files:
https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ConfigurationFiles

Learnt that account.xml contained saved passwords in plain text.
https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords

And that Pidgin 3.0 will support a keyring feature (Like KWallet, Secret Service)
https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/KeyringSupport

Help Pidgin get there! https://developer.pidgin.im/roadmap

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Speaking of Skype being a nuisance, for some reason when I logged into Skype my X session would crash, and the KDE log-in splash would display (logging back in). Since my KDE saves the previous session and restores it on login/boot, Skype would run and auto-login, and crash the session again, so I had to spam killall skype to stop the loop. 

Here is how I went about researching the bug trail to the fix:

[OK, so I wrote the intro above this line a couple of months ago and kind of forgot the whole process of how I got to the problem but here is a summary:]

While searching for a solution to the problem, I found this:
community.skype.com/t5/Linux/Skype-forces-reboot-on-Ubuntu-11-10/m-p/2844027
I may have used the search term I got while running skype in the terminal or something (still not too sure where Skype stores its logs)

Xlib: extension "RANDR" missing on display ":0.0".
skype: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.0.

So my suspicions that it was related to the X server were confirmed, but I still didn't know the cause.
Then I found this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2183029
And the work-around actually worked so now I hypothesise Skype loads some font loaded by X in "unix/:7100" and that supposedly caused it to crash.

The bug is in launchpad:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/738526

I opted to comment out the part in my xorg.conf instead of going to the extreme of uninstalling XFS:

# Apparently comment the below out to stop Skype crashing X Session
# Or sudo apt-get remove xfs (X Font Server)
#Section "Files"
#    FontPath        "unix/:7100"
#EndSection

Edit: Skype dumps massive (read GBs) of log files. If you delete the folder ~/.Skype/Logs as per this link from Arch forums, it won't create logs any more. It's probably some nefarious NSA reporting method.

Kid's can't use computers

http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/

Interesting article about how kids or the younger generation these days aren't really computer literate. They're just proficient users of browsers and web-apps.

Without reference to Wikipedia, can you tell me what the difference is between The Internet, The World Wide Web, a web-browser and a search engine?

Had to wikipedia what WWW was.

Can't wait for COMP3300 and COMP3310 xP. Also need to be proficient in at least one language =/

2012 SciFi realities and Future Tech + Virgin Galactic

http://myscienceacademy.org/2013/01/03/27-science-fictions-that-became-science-facts-in-2012/


That chimera - bloody biologists are making FMA stuff a reality! I also lol'd at the accidents on self-driving cars ...

Also, Oculus Rift (revealed 2012) is a giant leap for NerveGear (SAO).

And congratulations to the folks at Virgin Galactic for the first powered SpaceShipTwo flight breaking mach 1, add that to the list of official responses =P.

WLM going down, MS proves once again games are its only strongpoint

and not support, end-user OS/applications or anything else =P
Although I must say I prefer the PC to XBox/any console for gaming as it doesn't lock you into a particular device/device family. FOSS ftw!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20222998
Didn't realise MS bought Skype 1.5 years ago at $8.5bn massive.
WLM aka MSN will be turned off "by March 2013 worldwide, with the exception of China.".
Bye bye MSN protocol in Pidgin. Over these 10 years, you have served me well ='/